DEVOPSdigest

Chef received certification of its Chef Automate Incident Creation application with ServiceNow, available now in the ServiceNow Store.

Certification by ServiceNow is only granted to apps available in the Store and signifies that the Chef Automate Incident Creation app has successfully completed a set of defined tests focused on Now Platform security, compatibility, performance and integration interoperability. The certification also ensures that best practices are utilized in the design and implementation of the Chef Automate app with ServiceNow.

The Chef Automate Incident Creation application allows users to easily generate incidents in their ServiceNow Incident Management environment whenever they have failures in their Chef-managed platform due to either infrastructure automation updates failing or automated compliance check failures. This integration with ServiceNow gives Chef customers the ability to capture all failures across their estate for resolution and tracking purposes as a way to ensure any infrastructure automation problems are resolved rapidly and compliance failures are tracked and corrected based on internal best practices.

Key components of this integration include:

- Incident management for infrastructure and compliance automation – This capability gives users the ability to create ServiceNow incident tickets, alert/page operations or information security (for Chef failures or InSpec failures, respectively), so that automation and compliance failures are actioned as quickly as possible and in concordance with customer- or regulatory-mandated SLAs or OLAs.

- Intelligent data management and event de-duplication -- The integration intelligently uses Chef Automate as a central data aggregator and de-duplicates events, so that repeated failures do not open repeated incident tickets. Instead, they update relevant fields in ServiceNow, such as the time of last failure. This helps reduce overall alert noise, in contrast to non-Chef Automate approaches that send data directly from managed nodes to ServiceNow.

- Compliance-related integration opportunities with other capabilities on the ServiceNow platform -- The data stream of compliance events generated by this integration can now be leveraged by other applications on the ServiceNow platform. For example, governance and risk compliance (GRC) or security/incident management (SIEM) systems that have integrations with ServiceNow can now have access to this data. For those companies who have standardized on such systems, the data stream from InSpec through Chef Automate allows users to enhance their overall risk dashboard with real time, continuous compliance events that are already properly prioritized, rather than inundating these systems with meaningless, context-free data as was previously the case.

“This integration has been one of the most desired features, with many of our customers requesting this integration with ServiceNow’s premier IT service management solution,” said James Casey, VP of Partner Integration at Chef. “We look forward to working with ServiceNow to give our customers a single place to track all issues seen across their automated infrastructure that will improve the overall expediency of both ServiceNow and Chef Automate within the enterprise and help reduce the overall repercussions of any failure scenarios.”